Mobile design/Uploads

This page is obsolete. It is kept for historical interest only. It may document extensions or features that are obsolete and/or no longer supported. Do not rely on the information here being up-to-date.

The Wiki Loves Monuments app brought in a significant number of users new to Wikimedia projects. There is also at least one third-party Wikipedia file upload app available on the commercial market: Wiki Edit.

The general file uploading workflow on Wikimedia projects is very complex, requiring users to understand authorship, copyright, and licensing at a very high level. Uploads that come from camera phones can be divided into two general categories:

Original images taken by the uploader (e.g., Wiki Loves Monuments photos) that should be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons

This is the most common type of upload to Commons, encompassing about 75% of uploads from a random sample of 100 files uploaded in November 2012 (see chart below: original uploads in blue). This includes original photos of buildings, objects, people, and nature.

Non-free copyrighted works (e.g., a picture of a book cover) or freely-licensed images that are not the work of the uploader (e.g., public domain images, works whose license has expired)

This is a much less common upload type on Commons, about 25% of uploads from a random sample of 100 files uploaded in November 2012 (see chart below: reuploaded copyrighted material in red).

To see how Commons uploads subject matter compares to other popular file uploading sites, see the types of files uploaded to Flickr's Creative Commons branch (below), based on a random sample of 100 files uploaded in November 2012.

Diagram of the file uploading cycle

Commons uploads by type, original and reuploaded from other places on the web

To avoid forcing new/less experienced users to deal with this complexity on a mobile device, and to leverage the most popular existing type of upload (see User research below), we are currently focusing only on uploads to Commons under one license, CC BY-SA 3.0, on the mobile web.

Comparison of uploads by type and original/non-original work: Desktop and mobile, based on random samples of both. The rate of people pictures is much higher on mobile web – these selfies suggest most mobile uploaders are either just testing the system or think they are being asked to upload their own photo (e.g., photo of themselves) to Wikipedia.

Comparison of the two upload workflows, donate image to Commons and add image to article: The data show that both workflows tend to be producing the same kinds of uploads and the same ratio of copyright violations and other inappropriate images.